Since Ronda Rousey and Holly Holm had plenty of respectful things to say about one another leading up to UFC 193, yesterday’s scuffle between them surprised more than a few folks. But for those people who believe the incident may have been staged by the promotion, well, Dana White thinks that’s silly…

If you missed the weigh-ins (you can watch highlights of them here), then you didn’t see Rousey get real close to Holm for the customary faceoff, and then the latter put her fist right into the champ’s face. Rousey was extremely upset with what transpired, and she accused Holm of being fake leading up to the fight (in terms of being respectful etc).

Of course, when things like this take place, there’s always people who question whether it was legitimate, or just a stunt to drive sales. White spoke to Submission Radio after the headline grabbing incident, and while discussing this very theory, the UFC boss man said this (quotes via MMA Fighting.com):

“Well I can tell you this, that never happens. We never tell people to go do anything,” White said. “If you look at the falling outs I’ve had with fighters over the years, don’t you think that fighters would come out and say ‘they told us to go do this, and they tell us to go do that’? We don’t tell the fighters to do anything. There’s no push to sell tickets.

“Two women are selling over 50,000 tickets here, and this things trending as one of the biggest pay-per-views we’ve ever done, let alone this year. So yeah, there’s no push to go out and do anything fake. We don’t ever do things like that. And if we did, you’d have heard about it by now, believe me.”

White has a point, in that someone would have likely come out at this juncture, and relayed if they had been told by the UFC to stage an incident. UFC 193 is expected to be massive, so as he noted, having Holm and Rousey fake a scuffle would be kind of ridiculous.

But, you can’t blame people for being sceptical. After all, how many times have we seen fighters say they despise their opponent, wouldn’t brake if they saw them crossing the street, to then in turn admit it was all to hype a fight?